Re: [Boost-users] Spirit and CTTL

From: Aaron Griffin (aaronmgriffin_at_[hidden])
Date: 2005-09-28 17:24:29

On 9/28/05, Simon Buchan <simon_at_[hidden]> wrote:
> Aaron Griffin wrote:
> > Ok, I didn't go to school for computer programming, so I never had
> > experience with a "Compilers" class or anything related to
> > lexing/parsing.  But now I'm getting interested in it and have begun
> > looking at some things.
> >
> > Spirit seems good, but it seems very weighty to work with.
> >
> > I was wondering if anyone has experiences with Spirit *and* CTTL and
> > would be able to list for me some of the pros and cons of each.
> > Spirit is, of course, a boost library and would be easier to find help
> > and things of that nature, but CTTL seems to be a tad more lightweight
> > (I'm not really sure).
> >
> > Thanks for any and all replies.
>
> Don't forget to put a link in:
> http://cttl.sourceforge.net/

Errrmmm... I could have *sworn* I put that link in there....

>  From what I've seen, this is MUCH harder to write grammars in, but
> that's probably just because i'm not used to it.  Compare:
>
> Echo's back a Java/C++ program without it's comments:
> http://cttl.sourceforge.net/example_cpp_comment_strip_cpp.html
> Description of Spirit's comment matching facilities (amongst other
> uses), A file that demonstrates it is linked at the bottom.
> http://www.boost.org/libs/spirit/doc/confix.html

Hmmm, I see now.  Of course, you have to ignore all the extraneous
stuff in the CTTL example... and semantic actions and things like
that.
I actually started messing with both spirit and cttl on a similar
parser (contrived syntax) and while the spirit one is much easier to
write, there's syntactic things that bother me (+ would have been
better than >> for sequence operator, overloading [] for semantic
actions seems awfully arbitrary, and the requirement for
my_grammar::definition seems unnessecary), but I guess that's what
I'll have to live with, eh?